How far has the space program gotten in the last half century?
There are a few reasons for that.
1) there isn't much out there worth visiting. The Moon turned out to be a big ball of resource-poor rock. It was so dull people stopped paying attention to the Moon landings while they were happening. Mars is a slightly bigger ball of resource-poor rock, with a tiny bit of air. Mars is so dead it makes the Sahara look like the garden of Eden, and it's still the most habitable place in the Solar system that isn't Earth. It's really hard to argue for spending hundreds of billions of dollars of money stolen from taxpayers to send anyone there.
2) the US space program is just a big government welfare program for aerospace companies, one that spends far more time making sure that spending gets spread around to all the most important politicos' home states than in actually doing anything productive. Unless there's a war involved, government programs just don't seem able to accomplish much.
The space program isn't going to go anywhere until someone figures out a way to make serious money in space. That could be for asteroid captures for metal extraction, or for space-based power projects. Once there's money to be made, people will go there and get it done.
That assumes of course that we don't just run out of time down here. A serious energy crisis, ala Peak Oil, could derail the global economy enough to ensure that a real space industry never really gets started.
Surely the spontaneous origin of very simple life is more likely than the spontaneous creation of an all-powerful, all-knowing being who then created life, though.
I'm not a scientist or high level scholor, but there are some holes in evolution just like there are some holes in creationism, but saying that just because there is some evidence to support evolution doesn't mean that creationism is bunk either.
There are no holes in the basic theories that comprise evolution. Natural selection is the only scientific theory available that explains the complexity of life.
Comparing it to creationism is completely invalid; creationism is not a scientific theory. There is no evidence for it. It is purely wishful thinking. It doesn't even explain anything, because in order to be true it has to have a creator, whose existence in turn would seem to require an explanation.
What would the world look like if we didn't do the good things we do? (keeping in mind that Canada would stay on the sidelines in that world, too)
Canada was facing the bully in WW I for 3 years before the US got involved. For over 2 years in WW II. We were in Korea, Gulf War I, Bosnia, and Afghanistan.
I am grateful that the US was the strongest power to emerge from WW II and kept that strength up during the Cold War. Canada did our part in the Cold War, too. Not as much as I'd like, and our current military is a sad joke, but we've hardly been standing on the sidelines.
The only big US conflicts we've managed to avoid have been Vietnam and Iraq, and those both look like good places to keep out of, IMO. Since Canada hasn't actually been threatened militarily since 1945, I'd say we're doing OK.
Please, try and educate yourself before speaking in public. Evolution (as in natural selection) is the only theory that adequately explains the complexity of life. The "747" didn't appear from nothing, it evolved from very simple parts over at least 3 billion years that were subject to ongoing selective pressure. Natural selection can use random mutations to evolve complexity in a remarkably short period of time.
If you require God to explain the existence of complexity, then please also explain where God came from. It's a circular argument; adding God to the equation doesn't answer anything. If God must exist to create complex beings, then something equally or more complex must have pre-existed to create God. Ad infinitum.
Of course! I automate everything I can. That's why I have time to post here. You still have to know how to run the system to effectively automate it, though.
Awesome straw man. Fortunately, shirts and shoes have been tested on humans for thousands of years and have conclusively been found not to cause horrible side effects. So put some on, already, and stop whining.
What you're looking for is called a system administrator. Any server on the Internet requires one. Either you're willing to spend the time to learn how to be that person, or you should be paying someone else to do it. There is no piece of software that can do it for you. Believing there is will result in downtime and, sooner or later, someone hacking your server.
You can imagine all you want, but the fact is is that e360 are long-time spammers, spammers as in send all the UCE they can to people who never asked for it. They are not being sued for e-commerce confirmation notices. They are being sued because they are spamming scum.
Food is only that cheap because the US and Europe and, to a much lesser extent, many other countries, heavily subsidize food production.
On the other hand, I do believe it does not make strategic sense to not be able to grow your own food... but then that applies to manufacturing, too, and we've outsourced most of that.
There are different ways to be liberal. Protecting civil liberties need not be synonymous with promoting a welfare state. Indeed, it seems to me incredulous that proponents of both end up on the "left", when big government is both necessary for the latter and the worst possible enemy of the former.
Uh, no. How would that work, exactly? They do pay large union dues, but they also seem to like getting their automatic raises every year, regardless of performance.
Upgrading an RPM distro with yum is exactly the same as upgrading Ubuntu. Well, unless you deliberately shoot yourself in the foot by installing RPM's from a different distro.
I guess it depends on what you use it for. RHEL4 was in no way acceptable as an enterprise file server in an Active Directory environment IM
The whole point of RHEL is that packages don't change. You can always package your own Samba, though, and update over the core packages. Samba's actually pretty easy to do this with, you can probably just grab a Fedora dev SRPM and recompile it... a lot easier than a core scripting language. In fact, most applications are easy to package newer versions for and run on top of a stable RHEL or CentOS base. CentOS even provides a plus repo with MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP and some other things that are more current than base, if that's what you need.
Classroom teachers work a hell of a lot more than 40 hours a week while school is in. Marking, report cards, lesson planning, all things that do not occur with 30+ kids in the room. I know a few good teachers and they work at least 60 or more hours a week.
They do get summers and long Christmas breaks and spring break and stuff off, though.
I am not talking about the big bang, I am talking about where all matter came from
Matter came from the Big Bang and subsequent inflation. Well, at least the hydrogen and maybe some of the helium. The rest came from the first few generations of stars.
it's still superior to the libertarian notion of caring about nothing but yourself
Libertarians can and do care about all kinds of things other than themselves. They just don't think you should be the one to tell them what those things should be.
Slashdot Mirror
How far has the space program gotten in the last half century?
There are a few reasons for that.
1) there isn't much out there worth visiting. The Moon turned out to be a big ball of resource-poor rock. It was so dull people stopped paying attention to the Moon landings while they were happening. Mars is a slightly bigger ball of resource-poor rock, with a tiny bit of air. Mars is so dead it makes the Sahara look like the garden of Eden, and it's still the most habitable place in the Solar system that isn't Earth. It's really hard to argue for spending hundreds of billions of dollars of money stolen from taxpayers to send anyone there.
2) the US space program is just a big government welfare program for aerospace companies, one that spends far more time making sure that spending gets spread around to all the most important politicos' home states than in actually doing anything productive. Unless there's a war involved, government programs just don't seem able to accomplish much.
The space program isn't going to go anywhere until someone figures out a way to make serious money in space. That could be for asteroid captures for metal extraction, or for space-based power projects. Once there's money to be made, people will go there and get it done.
That assumes of course that we don't just run out of time down here. A serious energy crisis, ala Peak Oil, could derail the global economy enough to ensure that a real space industry never really gets started.
Surely the spontaneous origin of very simple life is more likely than the spontaneous creation of an all-powerful, all-knowing being who then created life, though.
I'm not a scientist or high level scholor, but there are some holes in evolution just like there are some holes in creationism, but saying that just because there is some evidence to support evolution doesn't mean that creationism is bunk either.
There are no holes in the basic theories that comprise evolution. Natural selection is the only scientific theory available that explains the complexity of life.
Comparing it to creationism is completely invalid; creationism is not a scientific theory. There is no evidence for it. It is purely wishful thinking. It doesn't even explain anything, because in order to be true it has to have a creator, whose existence in turn would seem to require an explanation.
What would the world look like if we didn't do the good things we do? (keeping in mind that Canada would stay on the sidelines in that world, too)
Canada was facing the bully in WW I for 3 years before the US got involved. For over 2 years in WW II. We were in Korea, Gulf War I, Bosnia, and Afghanistan.
I am grateful that the US was the strongest power to emerge from WW II and kept that strength up during the Cold War. Canada did our part in the Cold War, too. Not as much as I'd like, and our current military is a sad joke, but we've hardly been standing on the sidelines.
The only big US conflicts we've managed to avoid have been Vietnam and Iraq, and those both look like good places to keep out of, IMO. Since Canada hasn't actually been threatened militarily since 1945, I'd say we're doing OK.
Please, try and educate yourself before speaking in public. Evolution (as in natural selection) is the only theory that adequately explains the complexity of life. The "747" didn't appear from nothing, it evolved from very simple parts over at least 3 billion years that were subject to ongoing selective pressure. Natural selection can use random mutations to evolve complexity in a remarkably short period of time.
If you require God to explain the existence of complexity, then please also explain where God came from. It's a circular argument; adding God to the equation doesn't answer anything. If God must exist to create complex beings, then something equally or more complex must have pre-existed to create God. Ad infinitum.
Of course! I automate everything I can. That's why I have time to post here. You still have to know how to run the system to effectively automate it, though.
With no audit trail, _anyone_ can vote :/
Discrimination on attire is still wrong.
Awesome straw man. Fortunately, shirts and shoes have been tested on humans for thousands of years and have conclusively been found not to cause horrible side effects. So put some on, already, and stop whining.
What you're looking for is called a system administrator. Any server on the Internet requires one. Either you're willing to spend the time to learn how to be that person, or you should be paying someone else to do it. There is no piece of software that can do it for you. Believing there is will result in downtime and, sooner or later, someone hacking your server.
You can imagine all you want, but the fact is is that e360 are long-time spammers, spammers as in send all the UCE they can to people who never asked for it. They are not being sued for e-commerce confirmation notices. They are being sued because they are spamming scum.
Food is only that cheap because the US and Europe and, to a much lesser extent, many other countries, heavily subsidize food production.
... but then that applies to manufacturing, too, and we've outsourced most of that.
On the other hand, I do believe it does not make strategic sense to not be able to grow your own food
If Samba isn't doing what you need it to do, what does it matter if it is supported?
There are different ways to be liberal. Protecting civil liberties need not be synonymous with promoting a welfare state. Indeed, it seems to me incredulous that proponents of both end up on the "left", when big government is both necessary for the latter and the worst possible enemy of the former.
Uh, no. How would that work, exactly? They do pay large union dues, but they also seem to like getting their automatic raises every year, regardless of performance.
Upgrading an RPM distro with yum is exactly the same as upgrading Ubuntu. Well, unless you deliberately shoot yourself in the foot by installing RPM's from a different distro.
It would likely break your support contract, which is really the whole reason you run RHEL, isn't it?
Technically the packages should work fine, though.
If you need to update core packages that often, you should probably run Fedora.
I guess it depends on what you use it for. RHEL4 was in no way acceptable as an enterprise file server in an Active Directory environment IM
... a lot easier than a core scripting language. In fact, most applications are easy to package newer versions for and run on top of a stable RHEL or CentOS base. CentOS even provides a plus repo with MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP and some other things that are more current than base, if that's what you need.
The whole point of RHEL is that packages don't change. You can always package your own Samba, though, and update over the core packages. Samba's actually pretty easy to do this with, you can probably just grab a Fedora dev SRPM and recompile it
Classroom teachers work a hell of a lot more than 40 hours a week while school is in. Marking, report cards, lesson planning, all things that do not occur with 30+ kids in the room. I know a few good teachers and they work at least 60 or more hours a week.
They do get summers and long Christmas breaks and spring break and stuff off, though.
I'm not sure about the US, but i know that in Canada they make considerably less because of incredulous taxation.
Huh? As opposed somehow to the rest of us? All salary comparisons are pre-tax.
I am not talking about the big bang, I am talking about where all matter came from
Matter came from the Big Bang and subsequent inflation. Well, at least the hydrogen and maybe some of the helium. The rest came from the first few generations of stars.
Uh, no. Agnostics don't know what they believe (although most strongly suspect that religion is hogwash). Atheists are just honest about it.
What subpoena, what fines? Downloading is perfectly legal in Canada.
The bribes became publicly know. This is pressure to get a bill passed before they become too widely known.
it's still superior to the libertarian notion of caring about nothing but yourself
Libertarians can and do care about all kinds of things other than themselves. They just don't think you should be the one to tell them what those things should be.